← 10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Happier with Dan Harris
How To Work With Insomnia, Pain, and Your Mom's Voice in Your Head | Jeff Warren
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- [00:00]
Jeff Warren
Foreign.
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Dan Harris
This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? We've got a conversation today with one of my best friends and favorite meditation teachers, Jeff Warren. We talk about insomnia, chronic pain, how to turn down the volume on your inner critic, how to handle the existential fears that many of us feel for our loved ones, especially our kids, what to do when you feel stuck in your meditation practice, and the difficulty that many of us face when we're caring for our aging parents. What you're about to hear is me and Jeff taking questions live from subscribers to my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. We do these live sessions every week on video where we meditate and then take your questions. And if you sign up for the app, you can join us in real time. To get the app, go over to danharris.com there's a free 14 day trial if you want to try before you buy. All right, here's my conversation with Jeff Warren. The best B2B marketing often gets wasted on the wrong people. I can't tell you how often I'm scrolling and I get served ads for stuff I have no interest in. So when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over a billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, company revenue so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. It's why LinkedIn Ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of all major ad networks. So seriously, all of them. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com happier that's LinkedIn.com happier. Terms and conditions apply. Now that we're firmly entrenched in a new year, you may want to get more firmly entrenched in your at home routines. And doing that can be aided and abetted by Ed Elevating your at home decor Elevating your space. Which brings me to our sponsor today, Wayfair. From bedding and mattresses to storage solutions for every room in the house, Wayfair is your one stop shop. Refresh your living room with accent pillows, mirrors and faux plants for way less. They've also got stuff for your kids room. They've got kitchen essentials stuff for your home study. My wife bought a Bunch of stuff for her home study that I know she's really happy with. And I can tell you as an outsider to her study that it looks really good. Going on the site, which I have done many times, is a delight. They've got a wide array of options and it's all laid out in a really pleasing way. It's easy to find exactly what's right for you. So get organized, refreshed and back on track this new year. For way less, head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W A Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, every home. Let's do some questions. Jeff. Yes, this one's from Rebecca. Meditation is very helpful in managing my anxiety about life and well being. Acceptance works when anxious about the well being of my child. However, it is actually triggering acceptance. That is, I think, how do we get equanimity around existential fears for our kids? Jeff, just to broaden the question, for those who don't have kids, you know, around anybody that you love and feel responsible for.
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Jeff Warren
Yeah, I mean it's the hardest thing. I'd say it's the single hardest thing in human life, that question. Thanks for asking. The single hardest thing in human life. It's a practice. It's an endless life practice. Every parent, every human with any relationship will know that. Well, however old you are, sometimes people get hung up on the word acceptance. I mean, it's not the best word to use. That's why I prefer to use something like equanimity or think of it as this is the situation. Being able to truly recognize that this is what's happening. That's what the acceptance means. It's like this is a real struggle. This struggle is actually happening. This is actually here. I'm not going to try to avoid it, but also I'm not going to endlessly feed on it and obsess over it. It's more like, can I just be present with this exact clear seeing of how the suffering is and from that place of just like accepting that this is what's happening because it is what's happening, then what is the response? It's like you can hear that a million times, but then you have to try to put it into practice. And that's where that lives. You know, I have a regular practice outside of my a seated practice for that reason. So I can come into the practice of going, okay, this is my experience. This is the breath, these are the sensations. This is what's here? Can I really let myself be with what's here? Can I not fight against what's uncomfortable? Can I not try to grab onto some way to secure myself? Can I really be there from that training when I'm in front of my kid and they're having a hard time, that's the thing I'm trying to implement. I wish my kid had an easier time in life. I wish my 6 year old had less suffering. But he has suffering. This is how it is for him. So I have to accept that's the case. And then when I'm really present with him, I find I have better responses around what I can do and I can begin to implement some of what I'm learning in this life. I mean I'm just trying to be dead honest because I feel like I'm right in the middle of that too. And I be interested in hear what the wisdom of the group says, but that's what I do.
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Dan Harris
This really is not easy. It's where, where the rubber hits the road in many ways on, in practice it's like it's easy to practice with joy. You know, it's relatively easy to be mindful of an itch in meditation but when it's worrying about somebody you love and you can't really control how things are going to go, that is hard. And that's the reason why we keep coming back to do this practice.
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Jeff Warren
What I have noticed is that I can get into these real doomsday spirals about things that are based on what I see happening. I'm like, I project into what it looked like for his future. I project what his experience is. And those are mind states, those are like, those are passing convictions that you live inside and they feel so authoritative. And if I can back out of the story of that and just come into being, well, what's actually here, that is the practice again and again and again. That is why we meditate. And interestingly, if I'm less infected, I guess with my own convictions about how things are, then I have a cleaner way of responding to my little guy. And actually often it creates better patterns of relationship and even helps him feel better. So I think being able to approach as much as possible these people in our lives with more of a sense of kind of presence and spaciousness that also is enormously supportive. And which isn't to say that there are endless other resources and perspectives around this, but then we could be more available for those from that place.
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Dan Harris
Very helpful. Jeff Marie writes that she's got a nightly struggle with insomnia and chronic pain. Anything to say on that score, Jeff?
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Jeff Warren
Yeah, there are so many different ways to work with pain and it's one of those things where you have to kind of do a little bit of experimenting. I'm actually going to be writing a post about this, but some people find to what we were just talking about that there is the physical pain and then there's the kind of stories and this is definitely true with insomnia that happens, you know, you're not getting enough sleep. Then the stories about oh, you're not getting enough sleep and how screwed you're going to be the next day and all of that. The way they chain out and get bigger and bigger, bigger, then create more cascading stress hormones which prevent you to sleep less and increase the pain. And so to be able to notice all of that happening and back down into the actual experience can be helpful. And then it's like, well, what can you do around the actual pain? Like some people find going right into it, the very center of it and trying to stay with the heart of it can actually begin to. They start to notice that a lot of the discomfort happens in the radiation, the radiating around it, and that bringing it down is more helpful. Other people find that that creates too much intensity so that they need a really good distraction. They can find that they have a natural interest in doodling or in this, that they can pour their attention in that and that helps. And then doing self compassion practices can really help. That's around the pain. I mean even if you google different meditations response to pain. Like my teacher Shinzen had a great book called Breakthrough Pain with all of these really good pain strategies. But just to say on the insomnia tip, I think I mentioned this last time, but having a framework that my objective at night is not to get eight hours of solid unconscious sleep, but instead to get eight hours of rest or whatever it is. Like I'm gonna, I don't have to be asleep for all of it. But if I wake up in the night, if I can let myself settle and find some just almost like meditate in the night, then you can still get quite a lot of the restorative benefits of kind of that nighttime rest period without being unconscious. So that's been helpful for me too.
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Dan Harris
Jeff, just on an audio tip, is there somebody clanking or is there some sort of knocking a pen on the table or something?
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Jeff Warren
Oh, this chair might be.
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Dan Harris
Ah, okay.
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Jeff Warren
This chair is kind of loud. Hold on.
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Dan Harris
All right everybody, not a huge deal, but thank you for doing that. Just one thing on the and I think I said this last time, I have pretty bad insomnia. I have to get up super early tomorrow at 5:45 and I know what I'm going to do to manage that is tell myself whatever sleep I get is fine. I've been through many, many days of zero sleep and I've always been fine. And just calming my nervous system by reassuring myself that my amount of sleep tonight, even though I've got something important to do tomorrow, is not a referendum on my overall fitness and health or on how I will do tomorrow. I'll do fine because I've done fine before with little to no sleep. And just saying the thing to myself that I would say to my kid or any of you if you were in that situation is massively helpful. And on pain, I don't want to pretend to be an expert on this. One little thing that I picked up from Joseph Goldstein is just and I'd be curious, Jeff, what what you think of this zeroing in on being mindful of the unpleasant feeling tone of the situation. So just to step back in Buddhism, everything that arises has a feeling tone associated with it. Any sensation, mental or physical, is either pleasant or unpleasant or it's neutral. And so if it's pleasant, we want more, if it's unpleasant, we don't want it. And if it's neutral, we zone out. And so just noticing, oh, unpleasant, just tuning in just to the unpleasant instead of just labeling it as unpleasant, instead of proliferating out on the stories about how this pain is just going to get worse. I'm always the guy who has pain. How am I going to deal with this? Does that make sense?
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Jeff Warren
Jeff oh yeah, it's hugely helpful. It's all part of the same move, which is to disembed from the inevitability of things because so much of the suffering comes from the sense of inevitability. It will always be this way, just any way to kind of pop out of that. And so whether you're noticing a quality of the sensation, whether you're noticing whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, whether you're noticing a story, all of that has the same effect, which is to give us a little bit more space and to realize that we're not as subject to what's happening in the moment as we had previously imagined. And that's the that's the freedom of practice.
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Dan Harris
A pre submitted question here from Louis or Louis, I can never decide how to pronounce that. Can you comment Jeff, on the link between focus in meditation and focus in peak performance in sports or other activities.
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Jeff Warren
Yeah, I think they're the same skill. I mean, meditation is a bunch of skills gathered together. So you have the getting more clear, you have the accepting what's happening in the moment, you have the quality of kind of appreciation. But primarily what you have is concentration. We have a capacity to choose what we want to pay attention to. It's the most important human capacity. What you pay attention to becomes your life. And so meditation is the practice of choosing what you want to pay attention to and then committing to that. So there's this. First you select of the many things you could be paying attention to, you select something and then you, you, you, you, you kind of commit to it and you let your focus pour into it. In sports and all the stuff when people talk about flow or people talk about being in the zone, it has to do with there's a high states of concentration where you're paying attention to something that's not your worries. And the more you. And what's really interesting here is the more you gather or you recollect the pieces of your attention, the waving strands, the more you bring them into one direction, the more inherently fulfilling it it gets. And conversely, the more times attention splits, the less inherently fulfilling any one strand. So the reason it's so fulfilling to get absorbed in music and art and sports and your work is because of that, that concentrated quality. So and all that is to say when you're meditating and you're practicing concentration, that capacity to concentrate gets bigger in other areas of your life as well. So there's a direct correlation there. It's also a recipe for happiness. There's so many ways that meditation is training around happiness. One of the ways is this concentration piece. Like what are you doing where you're losing track of time? That's something you should do more of. No matter whatever the circumstances are in the rest of your life. Find ways to like drop your attention and lose track of time. And that's just medicine for the nervous system.
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Dan Harris
Yes. Another question from online here. This is from Mary. I started meditating as relief for depression a couple of years ago. It's been tremendously helpful, but I feel like I'm stuck in my meditation practice just going through the motions. Any tips on moving forward?
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Jeff Warren
Yeah, well, I mean, the first tip is noticing that's happening and normalizing the plateau. It's always like that. You start with the. It's a new skill. It's kind of novel. There's this contrast between before and after. It's exciting. You have momentum. And meditation practice can be really. There's an upslope sometimes, but there can be this real period of honeymoon period. And then it's like, all right, now I'm used to it. And the contrast is less huge. And so much of this part when you're in the plateau is about just that kind of confidence of, like, coming back to the cushion again and again. Like, you know, that statue, the Buddha, Whether it's rain, snow, leaves, sunshine, still you sit. So I would say, like, staying with the practice despite the plateau is part of it. It will change. And this is a good time to consult with someone who maybe knows your practice or get a little bit of extra advice, because it can happen that we do get kind of in cul de sacs. You know, I would want to get a little more information about your practice, like what you're paying attention to, the way you're paying attention. Because there may be ways to just shift up either the object or the way you're meditating that can create. That can unblock something. And that's also true. And that's why you know. And you can get insights that way also from just reading dharma books or doing things like this or hearing other people report on their practice. I wish I could give something more conclusive, but that would be what I would say about that.
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Dan Harris
That's great. Makes me think that one service that this nascent operation could eventually provide is the opportunity to speak one on one to. To a teacher occasionally super valuable.
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Jeff Warren
Or be listening to other people speaking one on one.
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Dan Harris
Yeah.
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Jeff Warren
Or not one on one. Or speaking in a group. Because then you're like, oh, yeah, that happened to me. And that's why I think also trying different techniques a little bit, that's like, why trying different kinds of meditations can be helpful. Like, notice when you're doing different ones, if you're going doing a bunch of guided practices. Well, which of the ones that have seemed to click or are working more? What is it about that? And then do them a little bit more, and you can get into a. A good stream that way.
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Dan Harris
Yeah, I mean, I think even for these sessions, these live guided meditation and Q A sessions, we haven't figured it out yet, but we're gonna start bringing people on from the audience and letting them talk to the teacher directly. Because I think there's enormous value not only for the person, as you just indicated. The value is not just for the person asking the question, but it's for Everybody else who gets to listen in. Because even though you might not think it, actually there's going to be something useful in there for you.
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Jeff Warren
Yeah. And actually, can I say one more thing too, please. Something about the inner teacher. The most important teacher in all of this is the quiet. It's in you. And that sometimes just spontaneously through the act of getting settled, you can get insights about, oh, where there's an impasse or there's something blocked. And you can also do this more explicitly by, at the beginning of your meditation, ask, you know, drop in a question like, you know, I. I'd like to understand more about what I. Where I'm blocked in practice or what is it that I need to know about my meditation. And you kind of just drop it in and let it go. And it's like you kind of planted the seed in your subconscious. And you, you sit, you get quiet. You'd be amazed, like the amount of insights to things that, that just come up spontaneously through you without needing to talk to anybody else. I mean, if you haven't tried that in a practice, I would recommend everybody try that in some way or another and just see what happens.
- [18:13]
Dan Harris
Yeah. Joseph has recommended that very thing to me specifically as it relates to creative blocks. You know, you're in the middle of writing, you don't know. How do you end chapter two? I'm saying that because I had that very question today. How do I end chapter two? And you know, you see the question in your mind, sit for a while. I mean, it's kind of like you may not get the meal. You ordered. Something. Something will come. Another question here that was pre submitted, Leonie. How can I turn down the volume on the constant narrative in my head? Sometimes it's evaluating, often it's just commentary, but it feels increasingly intrusive. It seems to take up so much space and gets in the way of just experiencing what is.
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Jeff Warren
Yeah, well, it does because you're doing. You're meditating. You're meditating on your constant stream in your head. You've chosen a terrible meditation object, as we all do. We are all meditating all day long on. We're just choosing to meditate on all this agonizing stuff in our head. So you're in really good company. And I have found the single, you know, the two primary. Three primary strategies. Three primary meditation strategies. You can choose what works best for you. They all work to some degree or another. One is replace the inner talk, the agonized inner talk, with more friendly messaging. You know, you do a loving Kindness, practice, may I be well, May you be well. You just start to like. You substitute different phrases in. That's a legit way to go. Second is you choose to pay attention to something else. That stuff's happening you. But you know, there's only so much real estate in consciousness. So instead of putting all of your attention in that real estate, you put your attention on the real estate of the breath, the real estate of that sound of the hum and the heat venture. And the more you bring to it, the more you find those other strands cool out. They may still be there in the background, but they don't have as much robustness. And maybe the one I'd most recommend, based on the vibe of the person who asked the question, I would say go directly into the thinking and get really curious about what those thoughts are made of. When you are listening to the narrator. First of all, where are you hearing it more by around your right ear, your left ear? More down below? Where is it happening spatially? If that makes sense. What is the tone? Is it urgent? Is it frenetic? Whose voice is it? Is it your voice? Or does it kind of sound like your mom's voice or whatever? Your grade three teacher just get like, get curious about it is. It's just a sensory object. Our thoughts are like inversions of our sensory experience. Thoughts happen. There's visual components, there's auditory components, there's somatic components. So kind of go into the thinking and. And get really, really, really curious about it. And I have practices like that on my substack where. And we have one in our book where you just basically deconstruct the thoughts. And I'm telling you, for some people it's a revelation because even just the act of turning towards them and getting curious about them, it often actually just cools out a lot of the thinking. So not only are you able to deconstruct the narrator or the problem or whatever it is, sometimes now it doesn't even show up at all. And so now you have this tool of just like turning with curiosity towards your thoughts can be one of the things that cools out now. Not always, but there's many, many things that can emerge from turning towards your thoughts that are very unexpected and quite liberating. So that's what I'd say about that. Yeah.
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Dan Harris
I mean, Joseph often recommends that you just ask the question, what is a thought?
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Jeff Warren
Yeah.
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Dan Harris
Because investigating that gets you right at this whole and often confusing idea of non self, the self being an illusion, or, well, what the thoughts feel so Real and so authoritative. But if I look for where is this thinking, who's doing it, who's receiving it? There's some fruitful not finding there profoundly.
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Jeff Warren
And. And I would. The only thing I would add to that is thoughts. You're noticing a thought, they're not just happening. They seem to be happening for someone, to someone. So you can look and go, well, where is this person? Who are they happening to? You know, and you kind of like do this 180 and you look back and go, what are they happening to? And you realize there's nothing you can find in there that they're happening to. It's like the thought is happening and then there's a feeling of you behind your eyes. A bunch of visual stuff is happening to the bunch of sensations of your eyeballs. There's no you in. Some people love that and find that deeply liberating. It's like, oh my God, there's nothing to take personally in here. The part that's most intimately you is just all that's happening kind of in space. So if you look at like Zogchen teachings in Tibetan Buddhism around the space of mind, those kinds of teachings can be really helpful around, like not taking thoughts personally. And then they just become this hilarious thing happening as part of the creativity of nature.
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Dan Harris
Just to say, I find everything you just said, Jeff, super helpful. And I know there are some people listening who are like, what the fuck is he talking about? That's also fine. Like, you're not a bad meditator if this is confusing to you. What I recommend to people is just play with this very lightly and don't worry about any result or insight. It just. Just knock on the door every once in a while and don't worry about any specific outcome. Let's see if I can sneak one more question in. This is from Thomas. I'm struggling now and have been for months with one parent who is sliding into dementia and is anxiety ridden, and the other who's trying to valiantly hold things together but lacks empathy and often loses it and speaks in a demeaning fashion to their partner. How could I better deal with this very difficult situation? Providing enough support to the one parent but not get too exhausted because I. I get sucked into their world and then calling the other parent on their abominable behavior while also acknowledging all the shit they're going through. Does that make sense the way I read it? Jeff?
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Jeff Warren
Absolutely. And just. Is it Thomas?
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Dan Harris
Thomas? Yeah.
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Jeff Warren
Oh, man. Just. That is such a hard situation. And so first, just. I feel you and that is self compassion to start. Like this is a very, very hard situation to be in. And of course compassion for the people you're caring for. And there is no perfect way through this situation, at least from what I can tell and from my friends who are dealing with similar kinds of things. It's like it's about doing the best you can. And the best you can do will get better if you're able to pull back and take care of yourself to whatever degree you can take care of yourself. And by that I mean some activity where you can settle the intensity of the situation and let it settle inside you and underneath you and you can kind of come to center and then you can come back into that situation with a little bit more presence from that place. There'll be more clarity around the right time to have the right conversation with the right parent, if indeed that time ever comes. I've noticed that with family members, if I go in with an agenda around talking about something then or at a right time or whatever, it almost always goes pear shaped. It has to be more like for me it's been like drop the agenda, just be a kind of compassionate presence. And often from that space opportunities emerge to be able to mediate more skillfully. But you know, the more you can do the self care for yourself, to settle and just to come in there and be in a place of kind of greater grounded availability, I think the better it goes. But it's just a really, really, really hard situation. And I was just talking to a friend who's in a. He's got a young autistic son and they're just. It's a really hard situation and it's going to be a really hard situation for a long time. So he's a meditator. He knows that what he has to do and what his partner has to do is just. They got to take time for themselves to build up capacity because it's going to be a long haul.
- [26:01]
Dan Harris
On this situation with the parent, I relate to it. I had this moment. This is actually a scene that I'm including in my next book five years ago where I had to drive my parents, one of my parents, not my mother, has dementia. So I had to drive my, my mom and dad from their apartment in Boston to this assisted living facility that I had my brother and I had chosen for them near me in the suburbs of New York. And it was just this like head splitting role reversal. Here I am like at the wheel, literally and figuratively uprooting them from their lives. After having been, you know, in the reverse situation where they're in the front seat and I'm in the back seat and I'm in this situation where they're in the back seat bickering a little bit. I've got their cat in a cat carrier strapped into the, into the front seat. She's screaming the whole ride. This is a four hour ride. She's screaming. This is like cabin is filled with feline ululations and like my mom and dad kind of complaining about what's on the radio and when's lunch and this guy's making a mess. And it was just like this total role reversal from when I was 7 and in the backseat and I just had this moment of like, I'm going to send everybody, including the cat and myself, Meta.
- [27:21]
Jeff Warren
Yes.
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Dan Harris
I'm just going to go through may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, which is a real, a cousin of meta or loving kindness. It's compassion or Karuna. That practice helped me stop trying to control the situation, jarred me out of my profound self pity and just gave me the golden fruit of patience. And it's very, very helpful. Didn't fix anything. It just kind of helped me get right inside so that I could just manage the ups and downs of the moment. Does that make sense what I'm saying, Jeff?
- [27:57]
Jeff Warren
Oh my God. It's beautifully said, beautifully said, brother. The sacredness of this life, you know, these are the people, these are the challenges, this is the reality. And can I lean into it? Can I embrace it and like not have this? You know, it's like kind of the broken hearted nature of reality. It's so. There's so much bittersweetness and you need both ends to feel the full. Here's what it is.
- [28:25]
Dan Harris
Yes, the poignancy of the whole thing. I mean, that's why we show up and do this practice so that we can train for those moments. And for all moments, frankly, the good ones, you want to be more there for them, to save for them, make them last a little bit longer. And the shitty ones, you want them to last a little bit less long. And you want to be as nimble and supple as possible. So that's the point of this practice. We all do. And then supercharge it all by practicing together. Which Buddha had this insight 2600 years ago, validated by modern science that, as I often say, life is better and easier in the carpool lane. So, Jeff, thank you for being so awesome generally and in response to these questions, appreciate you immensely and thank you all for being here. It's enormously meaningful to me to see all of your faces. So thank you. Love you guys.
- [29:18]
Jeff Warren
Me too. Friends, you don't have to do it alone. Come to these days, it's all about, you know.
- [29:23]
Dan Harris
Yes. Well said, Stan. Thanks, buddy.
- [29:27]
Jeff Warren
Love you, bud. Okay, bye everybody.
- [29:29]
Dan Harris
Peace. Big thanks to Jeff. Don't forget to check out my new app where you can hear lots of guided meditations from Jeff and many other amazing teachers. You can get the app if you go to danharris.com there's a free 14 day trial. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
- [30:15]
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